It’s More Expensive to Eat Healthy than Unhealthy. Who Knew?

A new study finds that healthy foods is three times more expensive than unhealthy foods.

According to a new study out of the UK, healthy foods is three times more per calorie than less healthy foods. Who knew?

This was a study published recently in PLOS ONE that attracts the price of 94 key foods and beverage items from 2002 to 2012. Now to clarify, these are foods you would find in any supermarket, and we are not talking about McDonald or Taco Bell here which were definitely more expensive. These are foods specifically used by the UK’s office of national statistics to measure the rate of inflation year over year.

Researchers matched the prices of those foods with their caloric content and classified them as either healthy or unhealthy based on their nutritional value.

What they found was that, not only has the prices of foods risen in the UK faster than the price of other goods, healthy food specifically have experienced a much sharper price hike in recent years—about $2.95 for every thousand calories of food compared to unhealthy foods which have risen to only $1.17 in the same amount of time.

So each year, healthy foods are getting progressively more expensive and studies from other high income nations have found similar results.

Obviously for countries with obesity epidemics like the U.S and especially the UK where obesity is one of the leading causes of preventable death, it’s important that people realize the effects of unhealthy eating.

According to the National Health Service, diet-related health problems cost an estimated 9 trillion dollars every single year!

But for households that are straddling the poverty line, it can be difficult to convince people that spending more money now on eating healthy will actually pay off in the long run. So the researchers in the study are calling on public health officials to address the rising prices of healthy foods in hopes that they regulate them and provide subsidies to those in need for the good of the nation’s health.

What do you guys think, especially for those on a tight budget? Does the price of food influence how healthy you eat?